My friend Michael Trucano, Global Lead for Innovation in Education, Sr. Education & Technology Policy Specialist at the World Bank, wrote a blog post two years ago about the pros and cons of banning mobile phones in schools. He noted that as early as 2009, France had introduced a bill to ban phones in schools. Now, that ban is a reality. Since when does France care more about mobile phones than their shrinking education budget?

When Macron was elected, he saw the election as a mandate to implement pro-business stances in a number of areas. As a result, the public sector is staring down some of its worst budget cuts ever, and schools are set to be hit particularly hard. Protest is a French art form, and while momentum is slowly mounting against these cuts, the French should be outraged even more that banning phones = good, banning education budget cuts ≠ possible.

I am passionate about the use of mobile phones for educational purposes when and where it makes sense. Despite being a pretty well-connected and wealthy country, technology in French schools does not abound, and maybe it doesn't need to. What does need to abound, however, is an education budget that truly demonstrates the value that the government places on learning and the current and future generations of children and youth who become products of the country's education system.

The education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, said that: "the ban was... a 'public health message to families', adding: 'It’s good that children are not too often, or even at all, in front of a screen before the age of seven.'"

From this quote we understand that the minister believes health can negatively be affected by too much screen time. But does it matter if the children can read at all, let alone on a screen? Does it matter if children have the non-technological support they need to learn when they are at school? The OECD's PISA 2015 rankings place France's educational performance at a paltry 27th, making it just around the middle of all OECD countries and a worse performer than even the United States. Will a mobile phone ban somehow free up money to improve France's slouching education system? I smell a red herring.

Phones bad! Education budget cuts good!

Elisabeth Riou, who teaches nursery school in France, said: “Unfortunately, the government cares less about children than it does about spreadsheets and budget cuts." Truer words have never been spoken.

I am typing this out from Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi reflecting on the past week spent with the good people of UN Habitat, specifically those associated with the CityRAP tool. The CityRAP tool trains city managers and municipal technicians in small to intermediate sized cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to understand and plan actions aimed at reducing risk and building resilience through the elaboration of a City Resilience Action Plan.

A few caveats at the onset here. This reads a bit more like an academic piece which it largely is. It is drawn from something larger I wrote a bit ago for another paper. It might also read like an attack on the SDGs, which is not my point. The point here is that the SDGs have generated some incredible results and I sincerely support them, but we must be mindful of what is being mobilised in our pursuit of them. My focus is education and I suggest that the provisions of the SDGs related specifically to that field suggest particular scaled interventions (or at least make those approaches particularly attractive). Scale exacts pressure on particular types of education.

As part of my association with the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh (a version of this post appears there as well), I recently traveled with colleagues to deliver a three day workshop on digital education for Syrian academics who have been displaced by the conflict. The University has worked for a long time with the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), a great organisation providing urgently-needed help to academics in immediate danger, those forced into exile, and many who choose to work on in their home countries despite serious risks.

We seem to have endless ideas on how to use Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). From job creation to women’s empowerment to civic participation, a number of ICT4D interventions have been developed and implemented over the years. Common question asked in my work is “what type of technology that might have biggest impact in our society in the coming years?”. As we have learned, ICTs in itself aren’t sufficient. While factors contributing to the success of ICT4D have become apparent, and many have written about them, I feel there's still a need to highlight some of them.

We have been some of the most vocal critics of Bridge International Academies (BIA), largely because most investigations and evaluations of their edtech impact to improve schooling in sub-Saharan Africa have been less than spectacular (many would say the impact is non-existent). So imagine our surprise to see Wayan Vota's latest ICTworks™ post highlighting the successes of BIA in Liberia.

We need to make women in innovation more visible, and correct the gender imbalance in the stories we tell. We need to tell more stories about the women working at the top of humanitarian innovation, and so today I sat down with Tanya Accone, Senior Advisor at UNICEF Innovation, to tell the story of a woman working at the top of a very visible humanitarian innovation team for a very visible humanitarian agency.

We do a lot of work on open learning as well and it was clear there was tension between these open educational platforms (like Coursera, edX, etc.) and their use in local contexts, particularly in emerging economies. There is tension there. Open educational technologies are too often framed as a transparent instrument for educational export, keeping (specifically Western or Global North) curricula, pedagogy, and educational values intact whilst they are broadcast to a global population in deficit.

I remember when I first started hearing the buzz about bots. My first thought? 'Here we go again...' - a reaction to the endless cycles of hype followed by business-as-usual that typifies the digital sector. However, over the past few months I've had the opportunity to design a few 'bots 4 good', and I'd like to share what I've learned: how they work, what they could be useful for, and where to start if you'd like to get one. I believe that done well, they could be really useful add-ons to your digital strategy as they provide a rich 'in-between' space for mobile users who aren't fully digitally literate.

Last week, I was at TICTeC 2018 where researchers, activists and practitioners discussed the impact of civic technology, or civic tech. This blogpost summarises the discussion of Two heads are better than one: working with governments.